Why Local Citations?

Not so new to the online marketing sector is local search. The same benefits from inbound links are brought to local search efforts as are traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. There has been a bit of a change in terminology, as local search refers to citations rather than inbound links, but all in all they are very similar items that you want to spend some time to get.

An inbound link by definition is any link that points to your website. A citation would fall into this category although anchor text is not necessarily a part of this link. Often a link within a citation has anchor text that is the URL that is linked. It may also be your domain name or site name. Not so much attention is spent on utilizing keywords in the links from a citation.

Citations are often from directory sites and other sites that will review or list sites within a particular market.

In SEO we want to define our anchor text to be the most important keywords that we have. We want to build multiple links with these important phrases. With citations we are often not allowed access to what the link text will be, yet the link itself is super valuable. There lies the main difference between traditional inbound linking and getting citations for your local marketing efforts.

Relevance has always been part of this equation and still is with local search. It’s not as important today, at least this is what I believe, although I am certain that it will be more important as time moves on. This is something that can be easily spammed to search engines and hence I believe that eventually more emphasis will be placed on citations from relevant sites within the same market, or complementary markets.

At Genius Local Marketing, we offer Citation Services to small business owners in order to help Google to find them. It is a fact that most people search Google for a business and if your business is not listed, you are losing business. We are experts at getting your citations accomplished and work hard with list managers to remove invalid and incorrect citations about your business that appear in a web search.